


The Sweet Kindness of Strangers

by cyndrarae



Series: Snapshots!verse [6]
Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Blindness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-06-01
Packaged: 2018-01-27 21:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1723292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyndrarae/pseuds/cyndrarae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott Summers had a harrowing childhood until Professor Xavier took him in. But Charles was not the first person that Scott felt truly safe with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweet Kindness of Strangers

****

“Hank! Get that foolish boy out of here!”

Scott froze in his place, stood as still as he could, not sure what he’d done this time to invoke Erik’s wrath. 

“I got him. Here, Scott…”

Hank’s voice reached his ears, deep and resonating and not really angry, just… exasperated. Scott stood quietly and let the mild-mannered young doctor take his arm, who then quickly turned him around the way he came and started walking him out. Out of wherever it was he’d gotten himself into.

“What happened?”

“You walked right onto the construction site. Erik could have killed you with that heavy slab of adamantium he was moving.”

“Adamantium?”

“It’s a kind of metal, very strong and very heavy. Nearly indestructible.” 

Scott kept walking, easily ushered along by the large hand in the small of his back. He usually hated being ushered, but bit his lip into silence and let Dr. McCoy have his way. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…”

The hand softly patted him then. “It’s okay, kid, not your fault. Putting the Cerebro together needs the utmost concentration and Erik Lensherr isn’t a man of patience to begin with, as you know.”

Yeah. He knew.

Professor Xavier’s big, damn ambitious project to build a machine that could track down more of their kind from all over the world, yaddi yadda. They’d better put his name on the patent, he mused. After all, wasn’t the mini-version, Cyberno something, first tested (and successfully at that) on Scott? 

Hank’s words brought him back to the present. “You really shouldn’t wander off on your own. You’re not used to the layout of this place yet.”

“How am I supposed to get used to it without getting around?”

The doctor sighed, and Scott snapped his mouth shut though not quickly enough. Under normal circumstances, he’d never talk to his benefactors this way and risk getting thrown back out on the streets again. But, damn it this was just so frustrating! Seemed like everyone in the mansion went on red alert every time they saw him approach.

Got shooed out of the garage yesterday when he bumped up against a Rolls Royce convertible the guys were working on. Spilled a whole jar of lubricant onto the vintage leather backseat, although technically it wasn’t his fault. What was the fucking can doing  _on_  the hood anyway? The stable guys were constantly freaking out that he might stumble and fall on a rake or something. And Xavier’s butler stalked him whenever he stepped out, getting all jittery and shrieky if he ventured anywhere near the damn lake.

“I understand you might be feeling a little restless with all the idle time on your hands, Scott. I’d try and enjoy it if I were you, because it won’t last forever.”

Scott turned right when the hand prompted him to, and then left towards a winding staircase he recognized. The oakwood texture of the railings was solid and familiar beneath his fingers, providing a reference point in his head around which he’d been trying to map the rest of the mansion.

“I can handle it from here.”

“You sure?”

He bit his lip in time this time, the big nerve in his throat twitched and that was the only indication of annoyance he allowed himself to show.  
   
There was amusement in Dr. McCoy’s voice when he spoke next. “I assure you, the Professor will be back in no time. You miss him. Don’t you?”

Scott tried to roll his eyes behind his duct-taped eyelids. He still didn’t quite trust Xavier completely, but Hank was right – regardless of his pretenses to not give a damn, he really did miss the old man’s voice in his head, his enthusiastic yammering about the theory of evolution and his endless string of quotes from books and authors he’d never heard of before.

The streets of Brooklyn were loud and chaotic, and enough to overwhelm people with regular hearing even, let alone someone like him. His lack of one sense left the others acutely tuned in, so much that sometimes he struggled to block it all out. New York City was such a relentless onslaught of smells and noises from so many different directions. In the beginning it bugged him (scared him) when he couldn’t trace each one back to its source but eventually he figured most of them out, classifying them – separating the threatening ones from the ignorable ones and such. 

And see, therein lay the problem with Xavier’s mansion… there were hardly any sounds or any discernible smells to speak of, or classify! The utter lack of  _everything_  left him feeling somehow more helpless and lost than in the anarchic world outside. So much he didn’t know and couldn’t identify, that the vast unknown had him sequestered in a narrow prison where he was completely alone and there was nothing he could do.

“Patience, Scott. Patience.”

“Yeah.”  _Whatever_.

Scott bid farewell to Hank and started to walk up the stairs back to his room with drooping shoulders. Hoping maybe this time he’d find something to play on his discman that he hadn’t heard twenty thousand times before.

On the twelfth step, he heard the sound of two giant doors opening somewhere behind him, but that’s not what made him pause. 

A faint whiff fluttered through the still mansion air all the way to his nostrils. Brows pushed together, he closed his mouth and took a deep, aromatic breath, mind already computing at top speed to identify the source – cinnamon. Unmistakably cinnamon. Also apple, and just a hint of nutmeg. Something warm, something delectable. Something tantalizingly… sweet.

Scott turned and started climbing down again. His stomach rumbled and his lips curled up as he suddenly realized there was still one place left in these premises he had _not_  been thrown out of. Yet.  

The kitchen.

With left hand outstretched to feel his way, the plastic cane in his right softly tapping a fairly regular rhythm on the polished floor, Scott slowly inched towards the doors to sensory heaven. The whiff got stronger the closer he got, only to get meshed with a hundred other scents housed under the roof. Spices, condiments, fresh fruits, last night’s brilliant turkey, something  _awesome_  baking in the oven and…  _eww_ … boiled zucchinis.

And then a loud, resounding female voice floated out from inside and it made Scott freeze, just for a second.

“Antwon? Is that you lurking in the corridor again?”

He stopped tapping his cane, bit his lip as he heard the footsteps thundering out towards him, surely planning to send him off even before he’d reached his destination. Damn, and he was so close.

“Boy, you get your lazy ass out of mah… OH!!”

Scott winced, tried to smile. The woman was obviously large, judging from the solid thudding sounds her shoes made, and clearly taller than him considering that’s about where the voice emanated from. 

“I’m sorry, I thought you was my youngest. Sure can be a pain sometimes…”

He gulped, wondering if he could possibly duck around her to get inside just for the heck of it. Damn that cinnamon bread (or whatever it was) sure smelled good. Scott didn’t realize his head was tilted towards the kitchen, giving away his evident craving.

“Would you like somethin’ to eat, dahlin’?”

“Uh… if you don’t mind?”

The woman chuckled, full-bodied and clearly amused. “Well, aren’t you the polite one! Come on in, you poor thing. Still a ways to go till supper but that don’t matter in here. A little extra feedin’ can only do ya some good.”

And before he knew it, the woman was taking his arm and gently tugging him towards the kitchen. Ushering him again, but strangely, this time he didn’t seem to mind.

The potpourri of a thousand different aromas, some exotic and others not, hit him all at once, filling his head and sending his OCD brain into overdrive. Soon as he entered, he was completely disoriented, losing count of his steps and no longer sure which direction he was facing anymore. Scott panicked.

“Hush now, easy mah boy. There, hold on to my little island right here…”

His left hand came in touch with a wide granite slab at chest-level, and he quickly gripped it. His cane clanked gently with something on the floor to his right. 

“That’s a bar stool. Take a seat, dahlin’. Go on now.”

The hand still holding his arm was warm and comforting. It calmly steered him until he could hoist himself up onto the stool, where he made himself comfortable and folded his cane into three. He still was lost and lightly wheezing, not liking how he was at the mercy of this woman and right now, not even sure why he wanted to come in here at all.

“Awright, now I want ya to listen to me carefully, boy. You’re bang at the center of the room, and right in front of ya ‘bout five yards north is the door we came in from.”

Scott started to breathe easy. Blocked the odors out for the moment and concentrated on the woman’s voice beside him. It was full of such kindness without being patronizing. 

“Now my name is Lily, and I’m the head chef here. And you’re Scott, right? Welcome to mah’ beautiful office, dahlin’!”

She was smiling, wide and pleasant, he could hear it loud and clear. 

“Th-Thanks Lily.”

“You’re very welcome! Think you’re taller than my boys so if you reach up with a hand, you might knock off some of mah lovely wine glasses. So do be careful now, will ya sweetie?”

He ducked his head shyly before nodding a quick assent. Relaxed back against the granite behind him. 

“Everything hot is three yards to your right, that means the ovens and the open stoves and two boiling pots of water. Everything to your left is cold, the freezer’s about seven o’ clock if you feel like a popsicle, and the sink’s at nine o’ clock if you want a drink of water. There’s a ton of little glass bottles of all mah magic ingredients on this table behind ya, so don’t go leanin’ back too far and we’ll be just fine. Alright?”

She waited long enough for Scott to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical question. He nodded quickly, too stunned to use actual words. 

“Good! Now… how would you like a slice of my freshly baked apple cinnamon cake with a big scoop of peach ice cream on the side, hmm? It’s a Lily Jackson signature dessert, I tell ya. You won’t find it anywhere but in here!”

Scott grinned so wide, his cheeks hurt for the next two hours. That may have also been because he sat the whole two hours right there in Lily’s kitchen, listening to her chattering away about everything and nothing at all as she went about her usual chores for the day.

She told him about her two boys, Thomas, seventeen and Antwon, twelve. She talked about how she came about to work for Charles, why she referred to him by his first name. She rambled about her favorite recipe for beef stew and her favorite Oprah episode and the time she almost made it to Chicago for one of the tapings, and she talked about how much she loved cooking and feeding  _young ’uns_  like himself. 

“Aw, bless your heart, dahlin’!” She exclaimed when Scott once got up to put his used dishes in the sink. “Would you like a drumstick?”

Scott listened to her intently, every word, storing the sparkling sound of her voice in his mind for future reference. He pulled deep breaths off her shoulder when she hugged him goodbye and sent him off to find something better to do with his time than sit around yakking with the help. Cherishing the beautiful scent of Lily Jackson – sweet and warm and cinnamony – Scott created a new category in his head to file his collection of smells and sounds under. Never could have imagined there’d be another besides threatening and ignorable. He called this one – Safe. 

Two weeks later, Scott came down to the kitchen sporting red glasses instead of pitch black ones. And Lily Jackson was just as he’d imagined. Beautiful, comely, affectionate, and like the Professor, yet another source of incomprehensible kindness that he would never ever possibly forget.

 **

Years later, when she was no more, Scott often woke up in the middle of the night and tiptoed down to the kitchen, sat there on his old bar stool with a beer in hand, or maybe a piece of cake. And he'd close his eyes, and reminisce the soothing sounds and scents of Lily Jackson. 

_"Bless your heart, dahlin'."_

And sometimes that was all he needed, in the middle of it all... to feel safe once again.

 

***** END *****


End file.
